Hair
by ally.enchantress
Summary: "Everytime she starts to question her reflection again, she alters it as a mark of rebellion. The question of genes morphed her into her own worst enemy." A short one-shot.


**Author's Comments: Possibly the shortest thing I've ever written, but it IS a one-shot this time. I swear. I hope. Yeah, I know. Don't make promises you can't keep... Well, anyway, it's a little thing that takes place between seasons 1 and 2. You can thank urbanslang16 (urbanSVUslang16 on Twitter) for the idea.**

**WARNINGS: Um... mild language, I guess. But it's not deserving of a T rating, so it's K+. If this bothers anyone, I apologize.**

**Spoilers: None, really. Too short for spoilers, especially since it's during the off-season.**

**Disclaimer: SVU belongs to Dick Wolf until my army of minions and I can convince him otherwise.**

**Summer 2000**

He had dark hair. This much, Olivia knew. Staring in the mirror, she found herself drawn to the color of her own tresses, deep brown and brushing her shoulders. She looked at herself, and she saw him. She didn't even know what he looked like, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not find an ounce of her mother in her. Unless she counted the fact that she was clearly female.

God, he was in her hair! He was everywhere in her. She couldn't escape him, no matter how hard she tried, because he was in her damn DNA.

She swallowed thickly, hoping to rid herself of the lump in her throat.

Apparently she had no such luck, because it stayed right where it was, resolute and stubborn like the inconsiderate thing it truly was. She wished she could just start over. At the beginning. She wished she could have gone back into the womb, found that stupid umbilical cord that kept her breathing, and wrapped it around her neck. Death would have been better for her, she thought, than this constant torture. He had raped her mother. He had gotten her mother pregnant, and he was Olivia's father.

Yet she did not know his last name. She didn't know his age, his height, his weight, his personality, his appearance. She didn't know who the hell the man was, and yet she saw him in every facet of her.

"Olivia Benson?" The woman calling her name was soft, tentative, like even she could see the horrors that lay buried in Olivia's skin. She was awash with them. They were like a thin coating of plastic, covering her, wrapping her in a little bubble and isolating her from the rest of the world.

Olivia stood and followed the tall, motherly woman to the back. A swiveling chair was waiting for her there, and Olivia wondered if she was overreacting when she thought it was threatening. It was black, the color made up of so many others she couldn't tell which ones were in there. There were blues, she knew. Possibly purple. Red, green, yellow… It was possible that those colors were all in there. But honestly, she had no idea what made up the color. She had no idea what was in the black. It was an unknown, a question, a guess.

The motherly woman smiled at her. "I'm Miriam," she said. She looked sweet enough, but Olivia had learned long ago not to trust someone who seemed too good to be true.

"Do you know what you want?" Miriam asked, a simple question with a complicated answer.

Did Olivia know what she wanted? Of course she did. She wanted to go back in time, and tell her mother not to walk across campus that day. She wanted to have kept the stupid blue hair she'd had during her senior year of high school, if only because she was absolutely positive her father, whoever he was, had never had hair quite that shade of indigo.

She stared at the scissors in the hairdresser's hand and met her own eyes in the mirror, one last time. She couldn't buy colored contacts, but she certainly could change this part of her. Maybe if she altered it enough, she wouldn't see him in every strand.

"Cut it off," she decided. It was a declaration she uttered with vehemence. "I want it short, short enough to spike, and I want it highlighted. All different shades of brown."

"Drastic," commented Miriam, but she took the scissors to Olivia's hair anyway. And even when she had to turn Olivia's chair to get a better angle, Olivia's eyes never wavered from the ones in her reflection. She wanted to see every last lock of hair fall to the ground until she was undeniably someone else, someone he was not.

_finis_

**And the verdict is... only to be read through a review!**


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